Discussion Board of Project “Free Scriptures”

Posts in this forum can't be a replacement for information which should be part of the project files! Some posts are still in German and will be translated or revised in the future. Beware: guest posts will be moderated! Last backup: 20140118T2107.

We're looking for new contributors all the time, since there's much to do in all fields covered by our project. The range of tasks spans from simple routine work like ensuring the uniformity of files up to complex issues like the development of tools, design of layouts or professional typography. However, don't worry, we try to keep the entrance barrier as low as possible and help out in case of questions. As Project “Free Scriptures” is a free software project, all contributions must be licensed under a free license. This way, an author first grants our project the rights to use the contribution, and by the copyleft principle, we are entitled to grant those same rights to everybody else, while the freedoms provided by the free license stay intact for each and every recipient, who also may become a distributor himself. Free licenses prevent technical or legal restrictions on a work, and that's exactly what we try to do: we want to ensure and actively protect the digital freedom of computer users. One exception to free licensing might be digitalized bible texts if they've got into the Public Domain after copyright protection has expired. We consider Public Domain as “free enough” – however, in some countries it is possible to release a work in Public Domain initially, which is a very bad idea, since Public Domain isn't freedom-protective at all, so a work under Public Domain can be turned into a restricted and proprietary work at any time. We don't believe that a user deserves the freedom to loose his freedom and/or the freedom of others. Further, we're limited to only use tools which are free software in order to ensure for everybody that our results are reproducible without restriction, and that the entire workflow is adjustable to custom requirements. The organization of the project follows accordingly: there are no specific goals, no deadlines and participation isn't compulsory. Instead, progress is made by a lot of small steps carried out by people who work on their own needs or interests.

Whoever has some time to spend for the (re)production of digital bible texts as and with free software is welcomed to contact us or to ask questions, if any. The ideal motivation would be to have a specific personal goal (to produce a specific result), breaking it down into small steps and implement the steps one by one, so immediate and intermediate results will be produced along the way.

If you want take part in the language teams because you care about authentic, verified, quality, free bible texts in your own language, you could join or start a proofreading or digitalization effort just as we did with our German branch “Freie Bibel”. If 66 volunteers would get one year of time to digitalize and proofread one book of the bible (volunteers with shorter books would help out those with longer books), each year a new bible text could be made available.